Getting Personal.

• Author: McKIMMIE, KATHY
• Position: Use of employee assistance programs

Indiana companies offer employee-assistance programs for personal problems. Do they work?

Employees should leave their personal problems at home. That's an attitude employers can no longer afford. With a scarcity of workers and an ever-increasing need to improve productivity, many companies are offering a confidential 24 hours-a-day, 365-days-a-year source of help.

"For every $1 spent in employee-assistance programs, $9 is saved in employee productivity," says Mary Ann Korbly-Shepard, regional employee assistance representative for United Airlines in Indianapolis. The biggest change she's seen in EAPs in the last 12 years is the expansion beyond alcohol and drug problems. "Over the years it seems that employees feel safe in using them for other things, like relationship problems and personal problems." Korbly-Shepard and a union peer representative serve about 4,000 employees in this region, covering all of Indiana and part of Chicago.

"EAPs started in the 1930s, when Alcoholics Anonymous started," says Leesa Freeland Smith, manager of Fairbanks Hospital's One-to-One EAP in Indianapolis. Fairbanks has been a treatment provider for chemical dependency for 52 years. Its success in getting recovered employees back to work led to coverage for all types of personal problems in 1982 with One-to-One. "The focus is on job performance with the company," says Smith, who now has contracts with 74 companies statewide, covering 25,000 employees and their families.

Many Indiana hospitals established EAPs to serve their own employees and later expanded services to other businesses in their communities. This was the case with St. Elizabeth Hospital in Lafayette, says its director of EAP, Bill Madden. The hospital began providing benefits to its employees in 1984 and now has 14 contracts with businesses covering more than 3,500 individuals. Madden, also president of the 100-member Indiana chapter of the Employee Assistance Professional Association, is seeing "more convoluted and complex issues" than in the past. What starts as a marital issue, he says, may turn into something else when you discover "they're drinking a 12-pack a day."

But whether the EAP is affiliated with a hospital, is in-house or through an independent provider, professionals agree on one thing: Confidentiality is critical. Workers and family members are given a toll-free number that can be accessed 24-hours-a-day, and "the only information in a report to the employer is how many calls...